"As its final exhibition before moving out, the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung is presenting “New Bauhaus Chicago: Experiment Photography and Film” from 15th November 2017 to 5th March 2018 and will thus be providing Europe’s first comprehensive overview of the various facets of photography as taught and practised at the New Bauhaus and Institute of Design.

The New Bauhaus was founded 80 years ago in Chicago by the emigrant avant-garde artist and former Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy. This legendary institutional successor to the Bauhaus was closed after just one year, reopened in 1939 as the School of Design and was then renamed Institute of Design in 1944. In its photography instruction, light was seen as an independent working material. As teachers, renowned fine-art photographers like György Kepes, Nathan Lerner, Arthur Siegel, Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind moulded generations of photographers. Education there focused on experimental approaches, ranging from photograms to extremely diverse forms of photography to the moving image.This exhibition project is part of the preparations for the Bauhaus centenary in 2019 and is supported by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes and the Federal State of Berlin. In the coming years the current Bauhaus-Archiv building will be modernised and expanded through a new building. In spring of 2018 the Bauhaus-Archiv is moving out of its home. Administration and storage areas will be temporarily housed in the Schillertheater.This photography exhibition focuses on the Bauhaus-Archiv’s unique holdings, which include not just photographic and filmic works by teachers and students but also publications and documents dating from the late 1930s to the 1980s. Independently developed, contemporary positions from Chicago will be shown to complement the exhibition. These examples demonstrate the relationship between today’s photographic practice and photography at the Institute of Design, which still exists today as part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, but has not pursued an independent photography programme of its own since 2001."